The present invention generally relates to designing integrated circuits, and more specifically, to performing global routing in integrated circuit design.
Integrated circuits are often designed by designing the functions and logic that meet a desired system specification. Once the functional and logical designs are completed, a circuit design is generated.
The physical design is generated by using the circuit design and determining where the elements of the circuit design will be arranged on the chip.
One aspect of physical design is global routing. Global routing is often performed by a global router (a global routing tool) that identifies pins in the physical design and nets associated with the pins. The global router uses the pins and nets associated with the pins to route communicative or conductive connections between nets.
The overall goal of a typical global routing process is to generate conductive connections between nets in the circuit design.
Once the global routing process has been performed, local routing processes are used to route conductive connections within the identified nets to substantially complete the physical design of the connections between elements of the physical design.